Plaskett Nutrition College

Weight Management Consultancy Syllabus

Whilst our main concern will be with weight loss, we need to understand some of the basic aspects of nutrition. These deal with the key nutrients that we have to control to reduce weight. They will also help us to understand how to lose weight without developing deficiencies.

In Section 1, we begin the study of nutrients and foods by looking at the main bulk nutrients that our diets contain: protein, carbohydrate and fat. Before one can consider individual vitamins and minerals, one has to know about the nutrients that make up most of our diets, namely the bulk nutrients. These are the suppliers of food energy and ultimately help to decide an individual's size. You will need to understand these so as to manipulate them with skill.

This section introduces the basic ideas of the training. The purpose of this course of training is to enable the student to help others who are overweight or obese to lose weight, and to do so in a professional manner. At the same time, it aims to motivate you and empower you to set up a practice as a ‘Weight Management Consultant’ that will lead to your gaining a good reputation in this field, developing a panel of satisfied clients and bringing you both status and income. Since losing weight is not easy, one has to be aware of all the different methods and ramifications that are a part of this intriguing subject. The professionalism comes from knowing a number of different “ways in” to help the clients and also from being able to develop awareness of the individuality of each client. This will put you in a position to find the best and most successful route to weight loss for each person who consults you. This will mean giving individual advice, not just the same advice to everyone. By recognising individuality we earn the client’s trust and appreciation and we also increase the chances of achieving the fullest possible success by being in a position to find individual solutions to each client’s problem.

In this section we explore 'The Theory of what Causes Overweight and Obesity'. We look at the underlying reasons for this current epidemic scale of the problem in developed societies throughout the world. Understanding this will give you an insight into what needs to be done.

The Weight Management Consultant clearly needs to understand as fully as possible the causes of obesity in order to be able to formulate good advice. It is necessary to understand that, although the ultimate cause is always eating more than the body requires, that factor is modified by many subsidiary factors. One, that always interests clients, is whether or not one may be predisposed by one's inheritance to put on and retain weight, so we deal with this question.

It is well known that being overweight or obese increases the chances of contracting chronic illnesses. This section examines the types of illnesses involved and the way that their incidence is affected by body weight.
From the standpoint of a Weight Management Consultant, the use of this information is to present clearly the vital benefits that your work can bring to your clients in terms of freedom from illness. This knowledge can augment your job satisfaction, especially when you can see the client's health condition improving as weight comes down. That can be expected to happen sometimes, but of course not always.
So, potentially this information can serve to inform your clients about the degree to which slimming down from an overweight or obese condition can help them to avoid very negative health consequences. By passing on parts of this data to some carefully selected clients, you may perhaps either improve their flagging motivation, or increase their satisfaction level with their early results or with the efforts they are making.

Areas Covered

the connection between overweight and ill health and the shortening of life

In this section we approach the practical side of the Weight Management Consultant’s job.
The greatest skill required of the Consultant is that of formulating the advice in a way that combines efficacy with client acceptability. The mistake most often made in the approach to weight reduction is to employ only one method yet in pursuing reduction in a person’s weight, it is best to come at the problem from multiple angles simultaneously. The person’s diet may well have to be the first and foremost approach however, the main alternative approaches involve several different ways of preventing excess food materials from being stored, leading to overweight. If control of the diet is the only method one employs, then so much depends upon strict dietary control that the will and the motivation of the client may be too severely tested. However, an approach in which dietary control takes pride of place, but is supported by a number of other approaches, is more likely to find client acceptability and is therefore more likely, ultimately, to be successful.
In this section we list these “prevention of storage” approaches before dealing more fully with the diet.

The principal purpose of this section is to understand the scope that we have to reduce food calories in the diet without necessarily reducing the total weight of food consumed. It looks closely at understanding and measuring food energy.
Working in this way with diet is kindest to the clients and makes fewer demands upon their efforts and their will to succeed.

The previous section talks mainly about the first principles of reducing calorie intake while keeping the weight of daily food dry matter level. This is done mainly by varying the extent to which each food class contributes to the overall diet; we simply reduce the proportions of those food classes with the higher calorie content.
This section now looks within food classes to pick out those foods that, individually, have lower calorie content than the average for foods within the class concerned and make the best contribution to an individual client’s diet. This is a further step to calorie reduction without loss of food bulk.

Areas Covered

different foods within any given class have different calorific values

In the Sections that have gone before, we have noted several key strategies aimed at reducing the client’s intake of calories.

This section gets down to the key job of building and structuring a diet to help each particular client - the aim now is to address the actual prescribing of diets to enable you to build upon the principles already learned and to give the client a workable diet that can achieve his or her aims.

This section takes you through managing the consultation, helping you to structure the activity to provide a satisfactory experience for your clients. This is the basis for a good approach to weight reduction.
The section culminates in the provision of example diet sheets with guidelines according to food classes and guidelines according to mealtimes and considers the benefits of both.

Brings us to the section where we set about designing slimming programmes that are not only effective at weight loss, but also promote good health. To give you an insight into the potential problems, we also look at the drug treatments given for overweight by doctors. We also take you through the guidelines for follow-ups after the first consultation.

This section deals with non-food substances, or supplements that with help with weight loss. It looks at how they actually achieve this and discuss their effectiveness and safety implications for the individual. These include some micronutrients, herbs, enzyme inhibitors and sequestering agents.

This rather substantial last section deals with a fuller and final part on “Managing the Consultations”. This further develops your consultation skills and objective setting in weight management practice.
It also addresses the tricky question of compliance and weight regain and how to avoid it.
Finally it looks at “Running your Practice as a Business” to ensure that you have a grasp of the business principles that you will need.